Mindspark
by Lucillia
Summary: After the first human telepaths crop up, the galaxy learns why the Vorlons should have kept that Hetrodyne the hell away from certain genetic experiments.
1. Prologue: The Traveling Hetrodyne Show

They say that everything is possible. That being said, I will tell you of a universe where the Mimbari had surrendered to save their own skins and people think Psi-Corps was the greatest thing to happen since sliced bread...

The reason the Mimbari surrendered for reasons other than because they'd discovered Valen's soul hanging around in a human body ties directly into why everyone except a select few telepaths think that the Corps is just about the best thing ever. The reason people think so highly of the Corps in this place is because here, the human telepaths weren't your run of the mill telepaths, and Psi-Corps was just about the only thing keeping them contained.

To understand how the telepaths of this particular universe became the way they were, you'd have to know that Bill and Barry were far from the first Hetrodynes to go missing. To those for whom traveling through time was just a matter of finding the right equipment, crossing universes was a simple matter. Getting back home was a slightly thornier issue however, what with the different laws of physics and all that.

Our Hetrodyne was the brother of one of Bill and Barry's ancestors who had theorized that there was more than one universe and set out to prove it. Shortly after proving it, he got picked up by some passing Vorlons who had been snagging subjects whose genetic structure they wanted to analyze in order to create human telepaths a few generations down the line. Being Vorlons, they never did anything rash (well, almost never) and creating telepaths was a slow and deliberate process in which they studied the human genetic structure very carefully in order to make the changes as natural as possible, and with as few side-effects as possible.

Well, let's just say that our Hetrodyne had had some experience with being in tanks, and had long before taken measures to automatically wake himself up in order to escape as a simple matter of survival. Hetrodynes who didn't learn how to escape from a tank by the age of five usually didn't live very long. Well, not with the same number of limbs and heads at least.

By the time that the Vorlons had realized what was going on, he had already discovered and made his own improvements to their telepathy projects and had been in the process of modifying their ship's engines. Because the changes he'd made to the human telepathy project had been so subtle in contrast to what he'd done to the ship, they did not learn the true extent of the damage the Hetrodyne they'd spaced had caused until more than a century later when the first generation of telepaths had cropped up on Earth.

Two decades before Messrs Philen and Duffy made their groundbreaking study that revealed telepathy's existence to the world at large, the silence of William Dexter's home was broken by a childish cry of "FOR SCIENCE!"...


	2. The Telepaths Are (Finally) Discovered

When Alice Kimbrell had read the article by Philen and Duffy, she'd thought it was a joke. How could it not be? Not only had Mr. Philen and Miss Duffy supposedly found a pair of telepaths despite the fact that the testing methods they'd used had never turned up any telepaths before, but during testing said telepaths had offered to improve the DAO imager and instead turned it into a death ray of some sort according to the report that had landed in her inbox.

The New England Journal of Medicine may have been on its last legs, but she could not in good conscience publish something that would take what little credibility that venerable medical journal had. Being the editor that killed the longest running periodical on the planet was just the thing she didn't need for her reputation. Her life had been in shambles since Albert had left, but she wasn't prepared to completely destroy it just yet.

Calling Philen and Duffy's advisor, she prepared to give the good doctor a piece of her mind for wasting her time with such garbage.

"It's not a joke." a rather harried looking Dr. Yazhi said as soon as he picked up. "We really did find AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH Get it off! Get it off! Get it off!"

"You expect me to believe that someone with a high school education managed to turn a DAO imager into a..." She started, wondering what the good doctor was screaming about since it wasn't in range of the viewscreen.

PZZZZZZZZAP!

"...Death ray." she finished weakly as the beam that had missed Dr. Yazhi's head by a couple inches burned a hole into the wall behind him.

"Yes, and I wish we'd never found them." Dr. Yazhi said before turning to look at whoever was cackling off-screen and whimpering.

Someone who was standing out of view of the screen said something that she couldn't quite catch.

"Yes mistress." Dr. Yazhi replied an instant before he hung up on her without so much as a goodbye.

After putting it off for a week, Alice finally gave in and published the article that could kill the New England Journal of Medicine for the final time, and on that rather dull day in 2115, a man whose political career had been going down the toilet read it. Senator Crawford read it, and did something he would regret for the rest of his life, he tried to take advantage of it. By the time he realized that he was stuck with the problem, he was well and truly stuck because nobody else wanted to deal with it. As for the power he had sought...Well, everyone loved the guy who protected them from the crazy telepaths they'd been unable to exterminate.

Kinda hard to kill someone who could be left for dead in an alley and come back a week later both fully recovered and in the possession of a giant bulletproof robot after all...

* * *

Somewhere in the Mojave desert, a woman and a small child ran. The lab had been burned, and it had only been sheer luck that they hadn't been burned with it. The woman who was half dragging the child as she wished that she could have brought some medical supplies or at least a... could hear the men and the hounds behind them.

_I don't like this game mama._ the child sent to his mother, he was cold, he was frightened, he was hungry, and this had to be the absolute worst game of hide-and-seek he'd ever played.

_We have to keep playing though baby. _the mother sent back as she helped her son into one of the cave dwellings in which their ancestors had once lived. _When the men come, pretend that the cave is empty, pretend that we're nothing but rocks. Can you do that?_

_Yes mama. _the child replied.

The men came, and mother and child sent out the mental image that the cave they were searching was empty. The men left. After the men left, the woman who'd been wounded when her lab had been destroyed strung a necklace with an over-sized pendant on it around her son's neck. It had been her last creation, and she hoped that it would be enough to protect her boy when she could not. If her son tried to create more Velociraptors or something like that...

* * *

Around the same time at what would have been a faux Mayan temple had it been another universe but was a rather Gothic looking lab in this one that had been plunked down in Buttfuck Nowhere Alaska, Blood, Teal, Smoke, Mercy, and Monkey were whipping the minions up into a frenzy. They'd known that someone would eventually come and do something about them considering some of the experiments they'd been running, but to come after them because they were telepaths? Seriously?

_Hammer_ Blood called, idly holding out a hand into which several of her minions fought for the honor of placing said hammer. _Socket wrench..._

And so it went until...

Ralph, George, and Bob had come to deal with the telepaths who'd taken control of half the surrounding area. Whatever the hell they were doing, it wasn't natural. I mean heck, the place they'd set up looked like Frankenstein's lab or something...

As they sat in their jeep chugging down liquid courage - the alcoholic kind, not the stuff invented by Mercy - there was a loud rumble as the lab split in two and a giant figure rose from the middle of it and all three of the men who'd come with a larger group who had gathered to deal with the telepaths did a simultaneous spit take.

"Holy shit! They built a Megatron!" Ralph yelled.

Those proved to be Ralph's last words, as the "Megatron" lifted off into the air at three times the speed of sound, halted a couple of miles above the Earth, turned, and fired the weapon it had been holding, completely obliterating the lab and glassing three square miles of the surrounding landscape.

"So Monkey, how are we going to get rid of this without anyone noticing?" Blood asked from her seat in the cockpit of the massive robot.

Monkey just shrugged.

"My flying monkey-dogs..." Teal sniffed as he looked down sadly at the black circle where the lab had been.

"You can make more later when we get to where we're going." Mercy said as she patted Teal on the back comfortingly.


	3. 2116 Was Not a Good Year

2116 was supposed to be a good year for Senator Crawford. It wasn't.

The first sign that this new year was going to go straight to hell had been when the space probe he'd been campaigning for since he'd taken office had finally been launched. It had been meant as a sympathy gesture from the Earthgov president for his having had the whole telepath issue tossed in his lap, but one of said telepaths had gotten their hands on it...

Out in space, a young man named Alexander Dexter watched proudly as the new probe was launched from the mass driver that was in lunar orbit. If his calculations were correct, they would be visited by aliens in less than a year. The aliens would be sure to visit if only to destroy the damn thing in order to get it to stop playing the "Song that never ends". With that in mind, he'd equipped the probe with several good-will gifts and a number of tourist brochures that had been put in a near-indestructible capsule that had been loaded on board. He couldn't wait to meet the aliens...

On the moon, Senator Lee Crawford's smile became decidedly fixed when he noticed that the light of the Hemdial probe's engines burned green instead of white as they should have. It was supposed to be the modern SETI, and now it was God only knew what because some telepath had been tinkering with it. He didn't know what it was about telepaths that boosted their intelligence and mechanical skills to near impossible levels and dropped their common sense to a level that would be matched by a particularly dim goldfish, but as soon as he found out how, he was going to fix that problem even if it meant cutting out half their brains.

There had been rumors of mad geniuses going round for almost two generations now, but they had tended to be disbelieved until the telepaths had started figuring out how to get their hands on equipment they shouldn't have. After a few initial and somewhat useless inventions, the giant robots and the genetically spliced monsters had started surfacing. If they hadn't had a tendency to blow themselves up creating said monsters and robots, the world would have been overrun long before now. As it was, people were looking at scientists with suspicion, which was absolutely devastating to the man who'd run on a scientific platform because he'd known that that was what the world had needed more of.

Just not the telepathic brand of science however...

Being interviewed by more than one reporter at a time failed to pick up his mood, despite the fact that he'd rated only one reporter just a few months earlier before he'd gone and put his foot in that whole telepath mess. Receiving a call from the woman who'd brought telepaths to the world's attention was just icing on the cake as far as he was concerned. She was a nice enough woman, but he could have happily lived in ignorance for a few more years before he went and lost his position to his opponent and retired to a quiet life. If he hadn't been stupid, Tokash could have taken the position. He hated Tokash, and this would have been the perfect revenge.

Despite the fact that he knew it would be bad news, he went and arranged a meeting with Dr. Kimbrell at the Ix Chel however, because he knew that she wouldn't have called him if it weren't important. After getting the small talk out of the way, Kimbrell told him what she'd come for. Apparently there was a way to identify who was and wasn't a telepath aside from the whole compulsive tinkering thing that some telepaths could hide. Apparently, there was a genetic marker that was common to at least 70% of all telepaths, which was information many would kill for.

It figured that one of that lot would've gone and created the others. If the bastard weren't dead, he or she would soon be. He'd strangle them himself.

On the way back to his rooms where he could get more information from the woman without any reporters listening in, the private tube car that they'd been it was broken into by a couple of armed telepaths who'd swiftly become distracted with tinkering with the car they were in in order to make improvements. By the time they'd reached the airlock that they'd been led to, one of the telepaths had been muttering something about adding rocket boosters to make the train go faster.

As luck would have it, he and Alice survived the assassination attempt because their kidnappers had been too distracted with the goddamn tube car that they sent them out with one of their minions. Big, slow, and stupid hadn't registered that weight and mass were two different things on the moon when he'd made his jump after he and Alice had dove over the side of a cliff.

When he called his rival Tokash in order to congratulate him on the failure of his assassination attempt after he'd gotten back from his involuntary hike, the man had hastily shoved something into one of his desk drawers as he answered the comm.

It figured. Every other goddamn pain in his ass was a telepath, so why not Tokash?

Yes, 2116 was shaping up to be a particularly sucky year.

While Senator Crawford was having a near meltdown, a little boy sat on the floor quietly drawing pictures in a pre-fab house in Arizona. While the child drew, the "medallion" that rested on the child's chest quietly ticked away holding back the tide, keeping the world dim for the child. There was cackling coming from the kitchen as the old lady who'd found him experimented with their dinner, but this stirred little interest for the child who quietly clutched the last thing his mother had given him.

This was particularly unusual for a telepath, but that was the way things were.

Like with all telepaths, the boy was tuned into the Wind on which all thoughts carried. Unlike all other telepaths however, there was no Fire to go with it, no burning desire to create, Create, CREATE!

Not particularly knowing or caring about what he was missing, the child sat there kicking his feet back and forth in the air as he drew with one hand and clutched the last thing his mother had given him in the other as an old woman cackled maniacally in the kitchen.


	4. 2117 Was Slightly Better However

2117 was a marginally better year for Senator Lee Crawford.

The first big news Crawford received was that there'd been a breakthrough by a pharmaceutical company that had managed to create a drug that shut down telepaths without killing them. While he wouldn't have minded killing the lot of them, he knew how history would view the man who gave the order once people had time to forget the massive wide-scale destruction they caused. That wasn't the sort of legacy that he wanted to leave behind, nor was it the legacy the current EarthGov President wanted to leave behind, though her concerns were more on the more immediate fact that aside from the fact that just about every telepath who was of age was registered to vote, every telepath who had family who loved them had family who also happened to be registered to vote.

Sure, there was a bigger number of voters who weren't related to telepaths, or weren't aware that they were, but the instant the bleeding hearts who hadn't been affected by the chaos that telepaths caused simply by existing started hearing about how "Poor Uncle Ralph who only made nifty clockwork toys in his basement and would never hurt a fly" got dragged off to the death camps...

It was simply easier on everyone's consciences to simply lock them up the instant they caught them.

Of course not everyone agreed with him and the President, so that's why he'd come on the DiPeso show with a few of the more "Harmless" telepaths. Why the DiPeso show? The damn thing had an audience of six billion live and twice that - many of them repeat viewers - saved. Bring someone on this guy's show and soon everyone would know who the hell he is. With everyone seeing the cute telepaths who built toys or screwed with stage lights until the lighting was perfect enough to win awards, or built robots that rescued people, and hearing how people had tried to kill half the really adorable now that you look at them telepathic guests because the actions of a few nutbags...

Well, most of the people screaming how every telepath belongs in a death camp would probably finally shut up. And when they shut up, he could find a way to deal with the problem in a manner that wouldn't have his name listed in the same breath as Hitler for instance. A a way to deal with the problem that likely involved injecting the lot of them with that new drug from Halotech even if the side-effects were a bit...

Well, a ten-percent suicide rate could be considered acceptable considering the circumstances.

He nervously watched the way the hands of every telepath except Constance who hadn't quite reached her crazy stage just yet twitched as if they itched to hold tools and do something as he sat through DiPeso's lame ass jokes. The last thing he needed right now was an incident. The Actress/lighting engineer who had also come to speak about her latest movie should be fine, but the kid from Glasgow who'd made a pitching machine with a three-hundred mph fastball, and the fireman who's giant robot had rescued a bunch of people during that earthquake last year could end up being trouble.

Fortunately, everything went off without much of a hitch if you didn't count the telepath in the audience who'd invoked Anna Keck's wrath when he'd accidentally set off that lighting disruptor that he'd just created, and Constance did her little thing. Constance being the sweet and adorable little thing that she was and DiPeso himself crying over the fact that someone had actually tried to kill her was sure to swing a bit more favor his way. Everyone wanted a solution to the telepath problem that they could live with, and the MRA that he and the president were proposing to the Senate which should sweep up the telepath problem as soon as they figured out how should look more reasonable to the people who had been sitting on the fence than death camps would.

* * *

Out in Arizona, a red-haired man who answered to the name of Monkey which was short for "Grease Monkey" in this universe was wandering around looking for pet-food, groceries, and whatever spare bits and bobs the local telepaths might have not picked up already while his "family" hung back in the lodgings they'd acquired fidgeting with bits of string, watching the DiPeso show, and slowly going mad because they had nothing else to do. What he found instead was an old-lady turning a car into an amphibious submersible at dilapidated mechanic's shop that looked as if it should have been closed and abandoned more than a century ago. Hanging around outside the building sitting next to a cactus playing with a bunch of rocks and doing nothing else was a small boy who couldn't have been older than six or seven.

_Hello, what's this?_ he thought/sent as he examined the boy further, noticing that there was something off about him, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. The kid seemed to be operating on that mental wavelength that telepaths operated on at a level that was common to higher-level telepaths, but there seemed to be something off about him.

Then it hit him with the force of a brick in a sock. The kid was surrounded by tools and an experiment was in progress nearby and rather than trying to tinker with either of these things, he was playing some sort of mundane game with some rocks. Even if the kid wasn't quite at what some people were labeling the "crazy stage", the stage where the desire to create and explore the boundaries of SCIENCE! becomes an almost overwhelming compulsion, the boy should have been poking at the mechanical oddities that surrounded him and asking his guardian a million questions per minute about how it all worked.

_What the hell's wrong with him?_ he asked the old woman who was currently messing around with the car's entertainment system.

_Dunno, but whatever it is, it's made him absolutely useless for anything aside from being a taste-tester for my cooking. _the old woman said from where she was fixing the car's sound system that looked as if it had been fried a decade ago. _You can have him if you want him, but I should tell you now that he won't make a good minion._

_Gee, thanks. _Monkey replied as he picked the kid up and carried it off. While the old lady might have something against human experiments, Blood had been whining about the decided lack of test subjects since they'd been forced to destroy their lab.

At least he had something to show for this trip aside from food for Teal's new ferret, and food for the rest of them...

"And in other news, EarthGov forces have ended the telepath Michael Dexter's war of conquest on Nova Scotia..."


End file.
